external hdd appears as raw format and crashes file explorer

[geobenn]

I have a seagate freeagent go 250gb drive that worked yesterday and quit today.

the hdd shows up in file explorer as disk drive G: instead of freeagent go like it used to

if i right click on the drive it crashes my file explorer (win 10 pro)

and according to diskpart it is suddenly raw format instead of nfts.

the drive spins up and but I dont know what it is supposed to sound like as it has always been quiet but it does not make any telltale death sounds

If anybody has some ideas as to how to recover data from it i would appreciate it. I wont be re using it just want the files

Thanks

[drHDD]

Could you take drive from enclosure and connect it to regular sata port and tell us if you see it in bios?

[labtech]

If you get to mount it and Windows prompts you with chcdsk function, then do NOT run it.
Need to clone the drive to a healthy drive.

[geobenn]

I removed the enclosure and pcb and connected the plain drive to my motherboard with a spare sata cable and power.

the hard drive appears in the bios and even displays the correct capacity (around 232gb)

When I try to boot the computer up from my main hard drive however, it displays the loading screen and does not change. normally my boot time is about 10 seconds but after a few minutes i decided to remove power from the drive and it immediately booted.

whatever is wrong with the drive it is preventing bootup.

[geobenn]

I would like to update that by using the hdd cloning tool provided on this site I was able to recover a vast majority of my files. The hdd had many many bad sectors and some photos and videos were lost and a few folders corrupted, i did get almost everything back the way it was and its sitting safely as a partition on my secondary drive. I will get many redundant backups asap. I have learned my lesson.

Takeaway: if the drive shows up in the bios, or file explorer but cannot be read due to "drive must be formatted to use" error, try cloning the drive and read from the clone. The cloning process was buggy but eventually returned positive results and can likely be used again in the hopes of recovering more.

thanks for the replies